1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer-based recreational benefit applications, and particularly to simulating communication delays at simulated spatial positions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of the computer age has brought about not only a revolution in getting work done, but has concomitantly enabled a proliferation of recreation applications in which the simulation and graphic abilities of computers are relied upon to produce the illusion of environments and situations that would be difficult or impossible to reach in reality. Many computer users have gravitated toward extensive participation in computer-based recreations. The proliferation of Internet connections has led to recreations in which parties may engage opponents some distance from them, even around the Earth from them. The proliferation of mobile terminals further increases participation in computer-based recreations—a person on a train on his evening commute home from work in Paris might participate in a recreational activity with another person on her morning commute in San Francisco. Such interaction fosters association between people from different countries and with varying interests, who otherwise might never meet. However, many consider association with people in one's own community to be preferable to association with far-flung people.
Some action-based recreational games tend to enforce play with local opponents for the simple reason that transmission time to distant opponents takes perceptible time. If two opponents are located antipodally on the earth (for example, a party in Istanbul against a party in Honolulu) connected by a medium such as the Internet, a theoretical minimum transmission time is on the order of 500 ms. Although this time is considerably greater than the time it would take light (and therefore an electrical signal) to travel halfway around the earth, other factors such as buffering and circuit switching also contribute to the theoretical minimum. Actual transmission time is typically greater than the theoretical minimum because of such factors as indirect signal paths and multiple bufferings associated with multi-hop transmissions. Such a transmission delay would not significantly affect turn-based recreations but may be detrimental to rapid-action recreations.
Many of the popular computer-based recreations simulate space-travel environments, for example a class of recreations often referred to as space trading simulations, in which parties compete for resources by virtually buying and selling them, fighting simulated battles for them, and so forth. These recreations generally ignore a problem that would occur in reality—that travel and communication over vast distances take significant amounts of time. Many believe the recreations could be more interesting if they included the realism of these significant amounts of time.
A number of users have become more or less addicted to playing computer-based recreations, and tend to get engrossed in them to the detriment of other aspects of work and of life. A system which encourages a slower method of interaction might permit such users to reduce their concentration on recreation playing.
Users may connect to a network at a different speeds. Some users may still be using older, slower telephone line modems, such as 28.8 kbps modems and even 14.4 kbps modems. Some may use more modern 56 kbps telephone line modems. Some users may have much faster connections, such as integrated subscriber digital network (ISDN) lines, digital subscriber line (DSL) connections, T1 lines, cable modems, or direct wireless (satellite) reception. A typical message is of such size that connection speed substantially affects the time required for transmission. In an environment where rapid receipt of messages is important, such as in an action-based recreation, a party who rapidly receives recreation-related messages may have a substantial advantage over a party who receives them more slowly. There is thus a need to equalize transmission times to parties connected to a network at different transmission speeds so that all receive messages at substantially the same time.